Morris Berman Wandering God

A Study in Nomadic Spirituality New York 2000 pg.117   AGRICULTURE, RELIGION, AND THE GREAT MOTHER    ...The farmer I will marry, The farmer who grows many plants, The farmer who grows much grain. —From "Dumuzi and Enkimdu: The Wooing of Inanna"; Sumerian poem, second millennium B.C. I have been arguing for the existence, historically, of two basic constel-lations:  HG (hunter-gatherer) society (or more precisely, immediate-return economies)— whose conception of the sacred is diffuse, paradoxical, and horizontal—and  agricultural civilization (or more generally, delayed--return economies)—whose notion of the numinous is vertical, ranging from a generalized sacred authority to the intense experience of unitive trance.  I have also argued that the pattern of horizontal versus vertical religious experience is, not coincidentally, roughly duplicated in the pattern of (relative) egalitarianism versus social inequality and that all of this, in turn, is tied into child-rearing patterns. Multiple caregiving tends to create a less "steep-gradient" child, and, in addition, the mother in HG societies focuses on the infant much less because she is directly involved in the social and economic activities of her society.  In DR economies, the woman's economic role is much reduced; she becomes a "professional mother," especially with the narrow birth spacing that is concomitant with a sedentary lifestyle. This entails a too-strong focus on the infant, giving rise to the "hal-lowed presence" phenomenon discussed by Erik Erikson. To complete the cycle, infants raised in such a context get imprinted for charismatic experience; that is, they learn to see sacred authority as expressive of the highest "truth," which then serves to reaffirm the vertical social order.  Men caught up in this configuration feel the need to be heroic; and when we combine this with the fear and insecurity that is endemic to DR economies, and with sibling rivalry and the need for intense parental investment, we get a configuration of aggressive subgroups, command/obedience relations, and prisoner's dilemma situations that characierize the power structures of the Neolithic age and beyond.  This is, of course, a kind of rough-hewn outline, but on the whole it would seem to be a fairly accurate summary of the negative aspects of life in civilization. What I wish to do in the present chapter is flesh out this out-line, and the modifications of it that might be necessary, in greater detail. For the point I am leading up to here is that we are living within a (Neolithic) mindset that has some validity m terms of cog-nition and perception, but that also represents a serious distortion.  It's not merely that we have lost spontaneity in favor of institutionalized life, but that since the Late Paleolithic, our very thinking process has been skewed in a "religious" direction, something that is generally hard for us to recognize.  The insistence on certainty (sacred authority) that characterized the Neolithic now shows up in the daily newspapers of the Western industrial nations and in the speeches of their politicians, who can seem to think only in formu-las. Indeed, Ronald Reagan saw nothing wrong, as president, in replying to questions at press conferences by reading slogans off of flash cards that he had assembled in front of him. More to the point, the American public found his replies acceptable, even "wise."  And when we turn to those who seek to change the dominant culture— "new paradigm" advocates or promotors of postmodernism, multiculturalism, and the like—we don't seem to do much better. It's oppositional logic and a new set of slogans all the way. (A differ-ent reality, but with "our crowd" now in charge.) Whether modern or postmodern, our world is caught up in a consciousness that has its origins in the SAC as the source of truth. We are all, in Eric Hoffer's memorable phrase, true believers. In order to escape from this "entrancement," as it were, we need to look at a number of things. One is the possibility that pre-agricultural societies had a different mode of consciousness; and I have discussed the notion of paradox at length. Another is the question of how this got lost, both on a macro- and a microlevel; and this was the subject of the last two chapters. We also shall have to talk about attempts to resuscitate nomadic consciousness, which I shall discuss later on.  Mechanisms of agricultural civilization What I wish to do right now is provide a closer look at the details, the mechanisms, of agricultural civilization. Specifically, how did the SAC (sacred authority complex) function, and where does the worship of the Great Mother come into this, if at all?  What are the relations among the Great Mother, agriculture, fertility, sexuality, rebirth eschatology, unitive trance experience, ideology, and social inequality?  Answering this is a tall order; obviously, I shall not be able to fill it. But let's have a go, in any case, and see what transpires. I'll begin our inquiry with the religion of the Great Mother. Religion of the Great Mother Unfortunately, this is no easy topic to discuss. Thomas Fried-man, in "From Beirut to Jerusalem", remarks that it is difficult to assess the situation in the Middle East because the minute the topic is raised, people become temporarily insane. The situation is not very different in the case of "the Goddess." On the level of popular culture, great numbers of people have uncritically absorbed a Jungian/feminist mythology about a goddess religion whose basis in historical reality is, with a few exceptions, quite shaky, but that has therapeutically become so central to their identities that any critique of that mythology is too threatening for them to en-tertain. Therefore, some degree of stripping away of the accreted layers of this pseudohistory will be necessary if we are to establish the reality of the Great Mother in agricultural civilization and determine what her actual role has been in the development of Neolithic culture.

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